A Matter of Life and Text : The Lives of a Fifteenth Century Florentine Book of Hours in the University of Ottawa’s rare books library

While the vast majority of scholarship on Books of Hours focus on luxury manuscripts, concentrating almost entirely on the book’s artistic program and patronage, much less attention has been paid to the more workaday Books of Hours which were mass-produced for laity with the means and literacy to acquire and use them. The Morisset Hours, a manuscript Book of Hours in the University of Ottawa’s rare books library, is such book, and despite its poor condition and total lack of illumination or m..